Monday, 11 August 2014

Prime Mover Mondays - 11.363636 miles high... and then we touched down... Stilll going at, twice the speed of sound.

Most people don't reckon it, but commercial air travel occurs at a sub-supersonic speed. Say between .84 to .92 mach, for a 747. All the speed of supersonic, with none of the BOOM. And commercially feasible fuel economy.

So in the 1950s and 1960s, why did Air France and British Airways develop a plane that would travel between Mach 1.0 and Mach 2, flying at supersonic speeds around the world? Lawrence Azerrad visits this question on Buzzfeed with his essay Flight of the Concordes.

I've harvested a few YouTube videos about this once-advanced, now-scrapped, visionary airframe and rotary compressor program that achieved Mach 2 without superfans or afterburners...

At the age of eleven I watched man walk on the Moon in real time in low resolution television. Airframe programs such as Concorde promised unlimited travel potentional here on earth.

Now it's all gone.

And why? Why was the Concorde restricted to subsonic speeds over the United States?